tar sands

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline was dealt a big blow in the 24 hours during which you asked your friends, family and neighbors to weigh in on it. In 24 hours, 800,000 of us raised our voices on this matter and yesterday all of your letters – that’s right, all of them – were hand delivered to Capitol Hill.

Every once in a while an opportunity comes along for all of us to be the solution. This is one of those times. We’re collecting a half million messages to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in the next 24 hours.

This dirty, dangerous tar sands pipeline is not in the national interest. It’s that simple. And the United States Senate, officials of both parties, need to hear that message loud and clear and fast because some of them are threatening to push a bill as soon as Tuesday, to approve it.

When you challenge Big Oil in Houston, you can bet the industry is going to punch back. So when I wrote in the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that we should say no to the Keystone XL pipeline, I wasn’t surprised when the project’s chief executive weighed in with a different view.

The corporate rejoinder, written by Alex Pourbaix, president for energy and oil pipelines for the TransCanada Corp., purported to cite “errors” in my oped. Let’s set the record straight, point by point.

First, the Keystone XL, as proposed, would run from Canada across the width of our country to Texas oil refineries and ports. It would carry diluted bitumen, a kind of crude oil, produced from the Alberta tar sands. On those points, we all agree.

I say this is a bad idea. It would put farmers, ranchers and croplands at risk across much of the Great Plains. It would feed our costly addiction to oil. And it would wed our future to the destructive production of tar sands crude…

Heard much about the Keystone XL Pipeline? If you get most of your news from mainstream sources, probably not. While there hasn’t been a lack of news about the transcontinental pipeline that would run from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf Coast, it hasn’t exactly been hitting any front pages. Oil spills get that kind of coverage, but proposed pipelines, not so much. Regardless, the environmental community has taken to the streets, and luminaries within the movement, from writer Bill McKibben to actress Daryl Hannah to scientist James Hansen, have all spent some time in handcuffs because of their vocal opposition to the pipeline.